1997-09-23 04:00:00 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- When Nicholas Traina was found dead of an apparent overdose during the weekend, his mother, novelist Danielle Steel, was heartbroken but not entirely surprised. Though her 19-year-old son had a history of drug use, the problem was much deeper: For his entire short life, Traina was tormented by mental illness.

"The only time he messed around with drugs was when his medications failed him and he was desperate," Steel told The Chronicle in the first interview she has given since her son's death Saturday. "This was not some wild kid, this was a very sick kid. The awful thing is I knew for years."

Traina apparently died of an overdose, according to the Contra Costa County coroner's office. He was found slumped on the floor of his Pleasant Hill home early Saturday.

A syringe was found next to his body, and a spoon with a burned residue and a cotton ball were lying nearby, authorities said. All are consistent with heroin use. Blood tests to confirm the cause of death will be completed in four to six weeks.

"He was manic-depressive," Steel said. "He wrestled with mental illness all his life. The biggest agony of my life is that for years, no one would listen to me that he was sick until we found a doctor in L.A. about four years ago who gave him amazing medication. He understood because he was manic-depressive, too."

That doctor, Dr. Dennis Cantwell, one of the heads of the psychiatric program at the University of California at Los Angeles, was the first to confirm Traina's condition as manic-depressive, Steel said.

"He was lithium dependent for the last four years -- lithium, Prozac and they fiddled with a third, but they didn't do well with the add on," said Steel.

Traina had neurological damage from birth and developed attention deficit disorder, although his IQ was very high, Steel said.

He had been in and out of hospitals -- in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York and Montana -- since he was 11. For the past five years, he was under the daily care of Julie Campbell, the former director of the adolescent program at Newbridge Foundation in Berkeley, a chemical dependency program.

"In the last five years, my job has been Nick," said Campbell, whose Pleasant Hill home had a bedroom for him, as well as the in- law cottage where he died. "Three years ago, he moved in."

When he was well enough to stay on his own, he stayed in the cottage, but most nights he stayed in the house. Two full-time psychiatric attendants were there to help, too.

"The amazing thing," Steel said, "was he could keep it together enough that most people outside his immediate circle did not know. He would pretend (the attendants) were drivers or whatever."

Campbell "was tireless with him. When he was in mental hospitals, we always had someone with him. The minute we could take him out, when he could be functional, we always took him out.

"Parents with children who are manic-depressive need to prevail and get them help," Steel said. "What's available is so limited. The very poor end up roaming the streets, and people with money end up putting them in very expensive institutions, garaging them, really."

He worked for a season as a TV reporter and was lead singer of the band Link 80 for the past 2 1/2 years. He toured this summer, but the stress was too much for him.

"He had to come home five days early," Steel said. "He sank into depression for six weeks, and only in the last two to three weeks was he coming out of his depression."

He recently founded the band Knowledge, she said, which seemed to pull him out of his depression.

Steel acknowledged that her son sometimes did drugs. "But most of the time he was proud of the fact that his band was straight. They used no drugs and no alcohol," she said.

"The last day of his life was one of the best days of his life," Campbell said. He had coffee with a young woman he was interested in, and played at the Bomb Shelter in Oakland. "He said it was the best show they had done."

Yet Campbell thinks Traina killed himself.

"I think he just gave up. To kill yourself, you have to have strength. You do it on a natural high, not on a low. I think he knew no matter how good today is, he would always have the pain of tomorrow because he was depressed," said Campbell.

"For the last year, every day I woke up wondering if I was going to find him dead today. I was the one who found him the first time."

Traina had attempted to overdose on heroin three times since October, once in the locked ward of a psychiatric hospital, Campbell said.

"He knew he couldn't do it (heroin). He had a weird chemical reaction to it," Campbell said.

Campbell's husband found Traina in the apartment Saturday morning lying on the floor, clad only in boxer shorts, leaning against the bed with a syringe next to him. He did not leave a suicide note.

"I think his life was a suicide note. His songs, his tapes, they all had pain in them," she said.

He loved his mother, Campbell said. For years he had fought her, but for the past two years he talked about how much he was like her and how much he loved her. In the end, Campbell said, he realized what his mother meant to him.

Said Steel's friend Douglas Cramer, a television producer who also has a grown child who has suffered mental problems: "Danielle and I often consoled each other at the low points. At the high points, we felt a small sense of triumph, but that in reality when you're dealing with a mental illness of this kind, there finally is nothing that the best parent in the world can do.

"She should know no one in the world could have done more than she has done for a child in this situation, and ultimately it's in the genes and the physiology of the child and beyond all of her care and worry and money and love and time."

The funeral will be at 3:30 p.m. tomorrow at Grace Cathedral. Mourners may pay respects from 5 to 8 p.m. today at the Halsted N. Gray-Carew & English funeral home, 1123 Sutter St., San Francisco.